As we continue our interview series highlighting extraordinary voices, we had the pleasure of talking with Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist who researches abortion and adoption in the US. This interview comes to you in a week where President Trump himself, and his acolytes, have blatantly disregarded the experience of pregnant people and decades of scientific evidence around use of Tylenol during pregnancy. We are no strangers to others trying to tell us what we should do with our bodies – from partners, parents, neighbors, doctors, state and local governments, federal agencies, and even members of the Supreme Court. We were delighted to talk with Gretchen because the conflation of adoption and abortion is complex, but also a false narrative that is widely accepted and perpetuated on the right. We hope this interview helps highlight the myths and misconceptions around adoption, and the many ways US policies are influenced by cultural views on parenting. These factors are not new, but are part of a rapidly expanding and dangerous category of ways other people are inclined to take decision-making rights away from pregnant people in the US. ReproHub and our community reject this entirely and are grateful to thought leaders like Gretchen and Renee who stand beside us. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, full stop.
An Interview with Gretchen Sisson, PhD
Diane: I’m seeing a lot about the Trump administration being pro-birth, pro-natalist. Project 2025 talks about “beautiful babies” and I’m curious what you think hearing a U.S. President say that? And how that relates to the history of adoption, providing babies for middle class families.
Gretchen: Adoption is fundamentally a conservative institution. Adoption is about upholding a very specific idea of who is worthy as a parent, and what types of families are worth creating and investing in. It has also always been about the transfer of babies from families with less power, to families with more. Usually, that power is about money, but it’s also about race, age, social class, gender. It’s geopolitical power when you talk about international adoption. But it’s also about conformity to a specific idea of what family looks like.
That’s why when the conservatives talk about beautiful babies and promoting childbearing, they’re not talking about a single Black mom who’s relying on public assistance to feed her three kids. They are talking about this white, married, heterosexual, middle class couple that they want to have more babies to address the demographic shift, as they see it. They also view the transfer of more children into those families as fundamentally good. That’s why adoption ends up reiterating these power structures.
Diane: In your book you provided some historical context of family separation in the U.S. With this in mind, I’m curious if you have any thoughts or comments on the current administration’s separation of families at the border and how it relates to the system of adoption.
Gretchen: When you look at the history of the United States, there are a lot of reasons for family separation. They’re all devastating, and the forces behind them are sometime separate, but not mutually exclusive. Racist, capitalist forces sometimes align, but often they operate slightly differently on different groups.
Family separation can be done for punishment, and it can be done as a way of extracting obedience. You see this when you look at the history of family separation during slavery, or during Jim Crow, or through today’s child welfare and family policing system. Historically, of course, these operate on Black families, but we see them being used against immigrant families today. The threat of separation keeps you from coming to the border, from seeking asylum, from using public programs, from sending your kids to school. It’s a looming threat the acts as a form of social control, and it has been used since the colonial founding of this country.
Families can also be separated for the purposes of assimilation, which is another form of social control and genocide. You see this with Native Americans whose children were taken away from them and sent to boarding schools, and later removed through the Indian Adoption Project, to ensure younger generations of Native children were acclimated to white society.
Then there’s also the market for family separation, because there is a market demand for babies. There are different types of market demands for children. First, there’s the demand for their labor, which applies more to older children and teenagers. You see this in histories of enslavement, of course, but also the orphan trains in which poor children – often immigrant children – where shipped west from east coast cities during the 19th century. Many of them were employed as domestic workers, as farm laborers.
Then there’s also a relatively historically new market demand for babies. When you look back more than 150 years ago, if you were poor and you had a baby you couldn’t afford, there was no market for that baby. But a little bit before the 20th century, you started seeing a market demand for babies because people wanted to parent, because people wanted to raise children, and placed a value on having children for that purpose. Americans started to attach a far more sentimental value to children and the pursuit of parenthood. Today, not many Americans have children because of the economic benefit that children bring to their household. They have children because they want to love their children; they want to raise their children; they take value in being a parent. This shift created a market demand for babies.
When we talk about the umbrella of family separation: one piece is punishment and social control; another is assimilation and genocide; and the third is the market – either for children’s labor, or for children themselves – which often ties into the other two. They’re all connected. The punishment piece has largely operated on people of color, Black families, immigrant families. The assimilation piece has largely focused on Native American and transnational adoption. And then the market (for the purposes of parenting) has largely operated on white children, but it no longer does to the same degree. When we talk about family separations at the border, those children are being separated as a threat and punishment, and probably also for assimilation to “make them into Americans,” and it also ties into the market because a lot of the separated children went to private adoption agencies and were put white American adoptive families. You can see how they all overlap, and any one example can have components of all three forces for family separation.
Diane: I would love to hear then, about what you think would be ways we could address this market demand.
Gretchen: On reducing demand, I think there’s a couple of things.
We could choose not to subsidize adoption. Federal subsidies for adoption increase demand.
We should make other pathways to parenting possible, through fertility education and covering assisted reproductive technologies. Most people who adopt try to conceive first, and when they can’t afford infertility treatments, they turn to adoption. So many women don’t know how to identify when they’re ovulating, or understand how they conceive, until they’re actively trying to get pregnant. That should be part of sex education. We make sex education so much about preventing pregnancy, that we don’t educate people enough about how you get pregnant. I don’t trust the Trump administration, but this idea of fertility education for younger people that they’re putting out, that’s a good thing. Educating people about their own fertility, developing their own understanding of their own bodies, their trajectory of fertility, how it changes. Those are good things. If we increase people’s understandings of their own fertility and make those treatments more accessible that is also going to reduce the demand for adoption.
We could also do a better job – or any job – of educating people about the adoption system, so that they choose not to participate. But most people aren’t not going to do that because they really want to have children.
I also think that we need to start shifting how we think about the value of caring for children. Right now, we only value care for children if it takes place in a parenting relationship. We always need people who want to help care for children, and should value that accordingly. We always have parents who need crisis care, who need temporary care. We have people who are dealing with incarceration, people who are struggling with addiction. I mean, we also need to have fewer people incarcerated and to proactively address the drug epidemic, but in the short term, we need people to provide crisis care outside of a parenting relationship. People could stop doing foster care as a path to adoption, and view it as a way of supporting and facilitating the child being part of their family of origin, long-term. I think that is really critical to reducing the demand for adoption — giving people who want to care for children a way of caring for children without formally adopting.
Diane: I’m curious about the current policy landscape in terms of adoption. You’ve described it as a “both sides of the aisle” issue before. Is adoption something that the current administration is pushing? Is it currently being incentivized with federal or state support?
Gretchen: Yes, adoption promotion is in Project 2025. There is an increase in refundability to the adoption tax credit in the One Big, Beautiful Bill. The adoption tax credit is extremely high – over $16,000 per adoption. It’s always been extremely high. There is a bipartisan bill to make it fully refundable, but I don’t expect that to pass this year.
On the state level, you’re also seeing adoption promotion. Through their Alternatives to Abortion Program, Texas is spending a couple million dollars to run a campaign called Modern Adoption, where they’re putting billboards promoting the idea of adoption in Black and brown neighborhoods. We’re also going to start to see more public money — like TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) – going to crisis pregnancy centers. That is already happening in some states, and I’m assuming that it will increase.
Diane: Can you tell me about the narrative of adoption as an alternative to abortion? Talk to me about what we’re seeing in the numbers.
Gretchen: The number of abortions has not decreased since Dobbs – in fact, it’s gone up. Most people are able to get the abortion care that they need. Even before Dobbs, some people were denied access to abortion because of logistical and legal barriers, and that continues to happen, but the overall number of abortions hasn’t gone down. Those denials might happening in different places or to different types of patients because of Dobbs, but it’s not necessarily happening more frequently because of the Dobbs decision. So, there’s no reason to believe that the adoption numbers have gone up as a consequence. However, we do know that even among those people who are denied access to abortions, 91% of them are going to parent. The vast majority are going to parent. Very, very few are going to relinquish. The idea that adoption is an alternative to abortion access, or to lack of abortion access just isn’t born out in how people make pregnancy choices. People do not relinquish if they have another choice.
Diane: If our work is to understand and support people in having the families they want, on their own terms. What recommendations would you have for funders and policymakers in advancing that effort?
Gretchen: Anything that makes it more possible for anyone to parent is also going to keep families together. Policywise, that looks like the child tax credit, affordable housing, food assistance, accessible healthcare, well-paying jobs. All of those things are crucial to poverty alleviation, and essential to family preservation.
There are some great organizations that are working in this space. Reproductive Justice in Adoption is a brand new organization. It’s a collaborative of relinquishing birth parents, first parents, and adopted people — all system-impacted people, including domestic and international adoptees — who are really trying to reframe the way our reproductive justice organizations understand adoption and how they include it in their messaging. They’ve worked with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, to reframe how they message around adoption on the Federation’s website. They’re doing really great work and that’s exactly who should be driving the work, people who have been impacted by this, and who understand how all these forces come together to shape adoption.
If you’re a progressive donor, you should be thinking about how we’re showing up in this space, because adoption receives really wide bipartisan support. It is time to push back on progressive federal electeds, who claim that you can federally subsidize a predatory anti-abortion adoption industry through tax credits and still be called progressive, and still brand yourself as someone in support of reproductive autonomy. You cannot be funding these systems and be in support of reproductive autonomy.
Gretchen Sisson, PhD is a sociologist who studies abortion and adoption in the United States. She is a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, part of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, a Natonal Book Critics Circle finalist for best nonfiction. In addition to her research, Gretchen is a co-founder of the Abortion Bridge Collaborative Fund at the Women Donors Network, a movement-led, rapid-response, trust-based philanthropy effort to address the post-Dobbs needs in abortion provision and protection across the country.
Resources
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood